Real Estate Blogging: Essential SEO Tips for 2023

Tips and insight for Realtors®

Simply put, well-crafted real estate blog serves a variety of purposes:

• Establishing Authority: By sharing insights and advice about the real estate market, agents can position themselves as knowledge experts, earning trust from potential clients.
• Improving Visibility: Search engines favor regularly updated, relevant, and high-quality content. So, maintaining a blog can improve an agent's search rankings, making them more easily discoverable.
• Building Relationships: Blogs provide a platform for agents to engage with clients and prospects, respond to comments, and create a sense of community. It also allows for some personality to shine through in your writing style.
• Showcasing Offerings: Agents can use blogs to showcase their properties, discuss their services, and highlight their successes in a non-intrusive manner,
• Generating Leads: This also allows real estate agents to capture leads - interested readers may sign up for updates, request more information, or reach out directly for services.

However, without the right SEO strategies, even the most informative blogs might end up unseen in the vast ocean of online content.

In this blog post, we aim to demystify SEO, sharing essential tips and best practices to help your real estate blog rise to the top of the search engine rankings, ultimately increasing your visibility and boosting your success in the competitive real estate market - if you're getting started with SEO, our comprehensive real estate SEO is a great place to begin.

Explore Professionally Managed Real Estate SEO Services

Find The Right Keywords

Keyword research forms the backbone of any successful SEO strategy, and when it comes to real estate blogging, the importance of using the right keywords cannot be overstated.

Finding the right keywords involves understanding your target audience, the language they use, their interests, where they are in the buying process, and the search terms they're likely to use when looking for real estate information or services online.

Keywords should be specific and relevant to your niche, and aim to attract the kind of audience who are likely to become clients.

When conducting keyword research for a real estate blog, consider the following steps:

• Understand Your Audience: Know who your readers are and what kind of real estate content they're interested in. Are they homebuyers, sellers, or investors? Are they interested in luxury real estate or budget homes?
• Using Keyword Research Tools: Tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, or Ahrefs,can help you identify popular search terms related to real estate in your area, as well as how competitive these search terms are. Some tools like Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest are free, whereas if you want to fully unlock the power of Ahrefs, you'll have to use a paid plan.
• Analyzing Competitors: Analyze what keywords successful real estate blogs in your area are using, this can provide you with inspiration on which keywords work well in your market. Tools like Ahrefs make this process easy.
• Consider Long-Tail Keywords: These are longer, more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they're closer to the point of purchase or when they're using voice search.

For example, instead of "homes for sale", a long-tail keyword might be "three-bedroom detached homes in X neighborhood."

Understanding where your readers are in the buying process will help inform the types of keywords you use in each blog. 

• Tracking and Refining: Once you've implemented your keywords, it's important to track the results to see which keywords are driving traffic and which are not. SEO is a continual process that involves tweaking and refining your strategy based on what's working, and what's not.

By identifying and incorporating the right keywords, you can optimize your blog posts for search engines, making it easier for your target audience to find your content, consequently boosting your online presence.

We've also written a a deep-dive blog post on keyword research for real estate, if you're interested.

How to Write a Great Blog

After conducting your keyword research, you can begin outlining the specifics of your blog, some of these include:

Choose a Relevant Topic

Selecting a topic that resonates with your audience is a crucial next step. Here are some guidelines for choosing the right topic:

• Consider Trends: Pay attention to current real estate market trends and hot topics. This includes changes in interest rates, new property laws, or emerging neighborhoods.
• Review Past Performance: Refer to your analytics in either Google Analytics or Google Search Console to identify the types of posts that performed well for you in the past.
• Seek Audience Input: Ask your readers, social media followers, or fellow real estate agents what they're interested in learning more about.
• Research Competition: Using examples of your competition and making an objectively "better" piece of content than them can be a fantastic place to start. Just remember to never copy and paste another competitor's content.

Writing Your Post

When it comes to writing the content for your post, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Craft a Catchy Headline: This is your first impression to your reader, and it should be compelling enough to draw readers in. Incorporate keywords when necessary, but don't force them to fit. Keep your headline under 60 characters whenever possible to ensure it doesn't get cut off from search engines. Finally, promise value - show how reading your post will benefit your audience.
• Outline Your Post: Creating an outline can help you structure your ideas and ensure you stay on topic. Consider using evidence, examples, or anecdotes when necessary. Identify the key points or arguments you want to discuss; these points become the sections or headings for the post.
• Use Writing Assists: Using a tool like Grammarly or something similar can help ensure your post is easy to read.
• Add a Call-to-Action(CTA): Whether it's subscribing to your blog, contacting you for a consultation, or checking out a property listing, be sure to clearly tell your readers what you'd like them to do next.

With that being said, the purpose of writing these blogs isn't always to capture a lead. Sometimes simply developing trust in your readers as an authority in the real estate industry is also a massive win.

Optimize for On-Page SEO and Local SEO

On-Page SEO refers to the optimization of both the content and HTML source code of a webpage. It plays a significant role in ranking and attracting organic traffic. In addition to using relevant keywords (mentioned above), here are a few key points to consider for On-Page SEO:

• Utilize Header Tags: Use header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to structure your content. Include your keyword in at least the H1 and one H2 tag.
• Optimize Images: Include alt text with relevant keywords for your images, this helps search engines understand the content of the image, and it's crucial for accessibility purposes.
• Use Internal and External Links: Internal links help search engines understand the structure of your website and can lead to higher engagement. Meanwhile, linking to relevant, high-quality external sites can add value to your content.
• Optimizing Meta Tags: The meta title and description are crucial elements that tell search engines what the page is about. They should be concise, compelling, and contain your main keyword.

 

We've also covered optimizing for on-page SEO for real estate websites.

Additionally, focusing on local SEO is incredibly important, as it helps you target potential clients in a specific area. Here's how to optimize your blog for local SEO:

• Use Location-Specific Keywords: Ensure to mention your specific city, neighborhood, or region.
• Localize Your Content: Write about local market trends, news, events, or features of specific neighborhoods.
• Include NAP Information: Your Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) should be consistent and present on every page of your website. This helps search engines associate your website with your location.
• Use Google MyBusiness: If you haven't already, claim your Google My Business listing. This helps you show up in local search engine results and Google Maps.
• Collect Reviews: Encourage satisfied clients to leave reviews on Google or other review platforms. 

Promote Externally

Social Media

Leveraging social media platforms can greatly increase the visibility of your real estate blog - here are some strategies:

• Share on All Platforms: Share your blog posts on all your social media platforms - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. Each platform may require a different approach in terms of messaging and image use.
• Engage With Your Audience: Encourage likes, shares, comments, and other forms of engagement to increase the reach of your posts.
• Use Relevant Hashtags: Including relevant hashtags in your posts can help you reach a wider audience beyond your existing followers.
• Create Teasers: Tease upcoming blog posts with relevant images or snippets to build anticipation.
• Partner with Influencers: Consider collaborating with social media influencers who align with your brand to reach a larger audience.

Also on our site, we've written a more in-depth perspective on real estate and social media.

Email Marketing

Email marketing can also be wildly effective at driving traffic to your blog, here's how:

• Newsletter: Include a roundup of your latest blog posts in your regular email newsletter. If you don't already have a newsletter, now is an ideal time to start.
• Email Segmentation: Segment your lists based on your audience's interests. Send them relevant blog posts that align with those interests.
• Personalized Emails: Personalize your emails as much as possible to increase open rates and engagement.

Guest Blogging and Backlinking

Building backlinks through guest blogging can boost your blog's domain authority and increase visibility in search engine results.

• Guest Post: Write guest posts for other influential real estate blogs and include a link to your own blog.
• Backlink Request: Reach out to bloggers who have linked similar content and ask them to consider linking to your post as well.
• Quality over Quantity: Focus on getting backlinks from high-authority websites. A few links from high-quality sites are more beneficial than numerous links from low-quality sites. We also don't recommend paying for backlinks.
• Monitor Your Backlinks: Use backlink-checking tools to monitor your backlinks and their impact on your SEO efforts.

Promoting your blog externally is crucial in increasing your reach and attracting more visitors to your blog. By using these strategies, you can increase your visibility and establish your real estate blog as a go-to source for insightful, engaging content.

Wrapping Up

Leveraging SEO is no longer optional for real estate professionals seeking to grow their digital footprint. 

Understanding your audience, using targeted keywords, offering valuable content, and promoting your blog effectively are key steps in building a successful real estate blog. 

Remember, SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it type process, but rather a continuous process that requires monitoring and adjustments to stay on top of changes in search engine algorithms and market trends. 

Don't be discouraged if you don't see results immediately - you often never will.

The online landscape might be competitive, but with these essential SEO tips in your toolkit, you'll be well-equipped to make your market in the real estate blogging sphere.

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